TY - JOUR
AU - Altonji,Joseph G.
AU - Bharadwaj,Prashant
AU - Lange,Fabian
TI - Changes in the Characteristics of American Youth: Implications for Adult Outcomes
JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL - No. 13883
PY - 2008
Y2 - March 2008
DO - 10.3386/w13883
UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13883
L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13883.pdf
N1 - Author contact info:
Joseph G. Altonji
Department of Economics
Yale University
Box 208264
New Haven, CT 06520-8264
Tel: 203/432-6285
Fax: 203/432-5591
E-Mail: joseph.altonji@yale.edu
Prashant Bharadwaj
Department of Economics
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive #0508
La Jolla, CA 92093
Tel: 858/822-6760
E-Mail: prbharadwaj@ucsd.edu
Fabian Lange
McGill University
Department of Economics
855 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec, H3A 2T7
E-Mail: fabolange@gmail.com
AB - We examine changes in the characteristics of American youth between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, with a focus on characteristics that matter for labor market success. We reweight the NLSY79 to look like the NLSY97 along a number of dimensions that are related to labor market success, including race, gender, parental background, education, test scores, and variables that capture whether individuals transition smoothly from school to work. We then use the re-weighted sample to examine how changes in the distribution of observable skills affect employment and wages. We also use more standard regression methods to assess the labor market consequences of differences between the two cohorts. Overall, we find that the current generation is more skilled than the previous one. Blacks and Hispanics have gained relative to whites and women have gained relative to men. However, skill differences within groups have increased considerably and in aggregate the skill distribution has widened. Changes in parental education seem to generate many of the observed changes
ER -